Born on April 8

894

Adalelm Count of Troyes
the Count of Troyes from 886 to his death.
He was a son of Emenon, Count of Poitou, and a Robertian

956

Gilbert Duke of Burgundy
count of Chalon, Autun, Troyes, Avallon and Dijon, and duke of Burgundy between 952 and 956.
He ruled Burgundy jure uxoris, his wife Ermengarde being of the family of Richard the Justiciar. By her he had two daughters: Adelais and Liutgarde. Gilbert never managed to maintain the independence of the duchy in the struggles for power of 10th century France. In 955, he became a vassal of Hugh the Great, count of Paris and married his oldest daughter, Lieutgard, to Hugh's son Otto of Paris

1250

John Tristan Count of Valois
a French prince of the Capetian dynasty.
He was jure uxoris Count of Nevers from 1265 to 1270, Count of Auxerre and Tonnerre and also Count of Valois and Crépy

1320

Peter I of Portugal
King of Portugal and the Algarve from 1357 until his death.
He was the third but only surviving son of Afonso IV of Portugal and his wife, princess Beatrice of Castile

1408

Hedwig Jagiellon (1408–1431)
a Polish and Lithuanian princess, and a member of the Jagiellon dynasty.
For most of her life she, as the only child of Wladyslaw Jagiello, was considered to be heiress of the Polish and Lithuanian thrones. After the birth of Jagiello's sons in 1424 and 1427, Hedwig had some support for her claims to the throne. She died in 1431 amidst rumors that she was poisoned by her stepmother Sophia of Halshany

1435

John Clifford 9th Baron de Clifford
a Lancastrian military leader during the Wars of the Roses.
For a time he was one of the strongest supporters of King Henry VI's Queen, Margaret of Anjou

1533

Claudio Merulo
an Italian composer, publisher and organist of the late Renaissance period, most famous for his innovative keyboard music and his ensemble music composed in the Venetian polychoral style.
He was born in Correggio and died in Parma. He was born Claudio Merlotti and he Latinised his surname when he became famous in Venetian cultural clubs

1541

Michele Mercati
a physician who was superintendent of the Vatican Botanical Garden under Popes Pius V, Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, and Clement VIII.
He was one of the first scholars to recognise prehistoric stone tools as human-made rather than natural, or mythologically created 'ceraunia' or 'glossopetri' - 'thunderstones'

1580

William Herbert 3rd Earl of Pembroke
the son of Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke and his third wife Mary Sidney.
Chancellor of the University of Oxford, he founded Pembroke College, Oxford with King James. He was warden of the Forest of Dean, and constable of St Briavels from 1608 to 1630. He served as Lord Chamberlain from 1615 to 1625. In 1623, the First Folio of William Shakespeare's plays was dedicated to him, together with his brother, Philip Herbert, 1st Earl of Montgomery

1580

Augusta of Denmark
the third daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark and Sophia of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, and Duchess of Holstein-Gottorp as the wife of Duke John Adolf.
She was politically influential during the reign of her son, Duke Frederick III

1587

Victor Amadeus I Duke of Savoy
the Duke of Savoy from 1630 to 1637.
He was also titular King of Cyprus and Jerusalem. He was also known as the Lion of Susa

1596

Juan van der Hamen
a Spanish painter, a master of the still life paintings, also called bodegones.
During his lifetime, he was prolific and versatile, painting allegories, landscapes, and large-scale works for churches and convents. However, today he is remembered mostly for his still lifes. In the 1620s, He popularized still life painting in Madrid

1605

Philip IV of Spain
King of Spain and Portugal as Philip III.
He ascended the thrones in 1621 and reigned in Spain until his death and in Portugal until 1640. Philip is remembered for his patronage of the arts, including such artists as Diego Velázquez, and his rule over Spain during the challenging period of the Thirty Years' War

1622

Lebrecht Prince of Anhalt-Köthen
a German prince of the House of Ascania and ruler of the principality of Anhalt-Plötzkau.
From 1665, he was ruler of the principality of Anhalt-Köthen

1634

Joseph Alleine
an English Nonconformist pastor and author of many religious works.

1641

Henry Sydney 1st Earl of Romney
born in Paris, a son of Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, of Penshurst Place in Kent, England, and his wife, born Lady Dorothy Percy, a daughter of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland and sister of Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland.

1655

Louis William Margrave of Baden-Baden
the ruler of Baden in Germany and chief commander of the Imperial army.
He was also known as Türkenlouis , for his many defeats of Turkish armies. At his death in 1707, his wife, Sibylle of Saxe-Lauenburg, acted as regent of Baden-Baden

1692

Giuseppe Tartini
an Italian Baroque composer and violinist.

1695

Johann Christian Günther
a German poet from Striegau in Lower Silesia.
After attending the gymnasium at Schweidnitz, he was sent in 1715 by his father, a country doctor, to study medicine at Wittenberg; but he was idle and dissipated, had no taste for the profession chosen for him, and came to a complete rupture with his family. In 1717 he went to Leipzig, where he was befriended by Johann Burkhard Mencke , who recognized his genius; and there he published a poem on the peace of Passarowitz which acquired him reputation. A recommendation from Mencke to Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, king of Poland, proved worse than useless, as Günther appeared at the audience drunk. From that time he led an unsettled and dissipated life, sinking ever deeper into the slough of misery, until he died at Jena on March 15, 1723, when only in his 28th year. Goethe pronounces Günther to have been a poet in the fullest sense of the term. His lyric poems as a whole give evidence of deep and lively sensibility, fine imagination, clever wit, and a true ear for melody and rhythm; but an air of cynicism is more or less present in most of them, and dull or vulgar witticisms are not infrequently found side by side with the purest inspirations of his genius

1726

Lewis Morris
an American landowner and developer from Morrisania, New York.
He signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence as a delegate to the Continental Congress from New York

1732

David Rittenhouse
a renowned American astronomer, inventor, clockmaker, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman and public official.
Rittenhouse was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the first director of the United States Mint

1761

William Joseph Chaminade
a French Catholic priest who survived persecution during the French Revolution and later founded the Society of Mary, usually called the Marianists, in 1817.
He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on September 3, 2000, his feast day is celebrated on January 22

1770

John Thomas Campbell
an public servant and politician in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly during the early colonial period.

1774

Grigory Langsdorff
a German-Russian naturalist and explorer, as well as a Russian diplomat, better known by his Russian first name, Grigori Ivanovitch.
He was a member and correspondent of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and a respected physician, graduated in medicine and natural history at the University of Göttingen, Germany

1775

Adam Albert von Neipperg
an Austrian general and statesman.
He was the son of a diplomat, famous for inventing a letter-copying machine, and the grandson of Wilhelm Reinhard von Neipperg

1777

Antoine Risso
a Niçard naturalist.

1779

Johann Schweigger
a German chemist, physicist, and professor of mathematics born in Erlangen.

Karl Ludwig Hencke
a German amateur astronomer.
He is sometimes confused with Johann Franz Encke, another German astronomer

1798

Ramón de la Sagra
a Galician anarchist, politician, writer and botanist, who founded the world's first anarchist journal, El Porvenir.

1798

Dionysios Solomos
a Greek poet from Zakynthos.
He is best known for writing the Hymn to Liberty , of which the first two stanzas, set to music by Nikolaos Mantzaros, became the Greek national anthem in 1865. He was the central figure of the Heptanese School of poetry, and is considered the national poet of Greece—not only because he wrote the national anthem, but also because he contributed to the preservation of earlier poetic tradition and highlighted its usefulness to modern literature. Other notable poems include Ὁ Κρητικός , Ἐλεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι and others. A characteristic of his work is that no poem except the Hymn to Liberty was completed, and almost nothing was published during his lifetime

1801

Eugène Burnouf
an eminent French scholar and orientalist who made significant contributions to the deciphering of Old Persian cuneiform.

Christian IX of Denmark
King of Denmark from 1863 to 1906.
From 1863 to 1864, he was concurrently Duke of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg

1818

August Wilhelm von Hofmann
a German chemist.
After studying under Justus von Liebig at the University of Giessen, Hofmann became the first director of the Royal College of Chemistry in London, in 1845. In 1865 he returned Germany to accept a position at the University of Berlin as a teacher and researcher. After his return he co-founded the German Chemical Society. In both London and Berlin, Hofmann recreated the style of laboratory instruction established by Liebig at Giessen, fostering a school of chemistry focused on experimental organic chemistry and its industrial applications

1822

Charles Frédéric Girard
a French biologist specializing in ichthyology and herpetology.

1822

Hermann Welcker
a German anatomist and anthropologist who was born in Giessen.
He was a nephew to philologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker

1824

Princess Sophie of the Netherlands
the only daughter of King William II of the Netherlands and of his wife Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna of Russia.
She was heir presumptive to her niece, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, for seven years, from the death of her brother until her own death

1824

Johannes Groenland
a German botanist, horticulturist, and microscopist.
He was born April 8, 1824 in Altona, a borough of Hamburg that was part of the Duchy of Holstein at that time. He was the son of Johann Friedrich Grönland, a German organist and music teacher. Groenland was trained in pharmacology in his youth and served as a pharmacist in Altona, Hamburg, and Jena in his early 20s. In 1849 he joined the Schleswig-Holstein army to fight in the First Schleswig War. After the war, Groenland moved to Paris to work as an assistant to Louis de Vilmorin, a French biologist and horticulturist who was also a member of the family firm Vilmorin-Andrieux. While working for Vilmorin, Groenland worked with Theodor Rümpler to prepare the German edition of Les fleurs de pleine terre

1826

Pancha Carrasco
Costa Rica's first woman in the military.
Carrasco is most famous for joining the defending forces at the Battle of Rivas in 1856 with a rifle and bullets. The strength and determination she showed there made her a symbol of national pride and she was later honored with a Costa Rican postage stamp, a Coast Guard vessel, and the creation of the "Pancha Carrasco Police Women's Excellence Award"

1827

Ramón Emeterio Betances
a Puerto Rican nationalist.
He was the primary instigator of the Grito de Lares revolution and is considered to be the father of the Puerto Rican independence movement. Since the Grito galvanized a burgeoning nationalist movement among Puerto Ricans, Betances is also considered "El Padre de la Patria". Because of his charitable deeds for people in need, he also became known as "El Padre de los Pobres"